Schemes And Conspiracies

Shen Zhuozhuo is the hidden second beauty of a merchant family. After a depraved young marquis abducts and brutalizes her elder sister, then wipes out the Shen household for daring to demand justice, Zhuozhuo survives with one purpose: revenge. Assuming the identity of a scholar’s dead sister, she enters the imperial palace and draws the emperor close, turning her beauty, patience, and even her own body into weapons. To destroy the Marquis of Cheng’en and the Empress Dowager who shields him, she baits each enemy into a trap more dangerous than the last. But when calculated affection meets the emperor’s unexpected sincerity, Zhuozhuo must decide whether vengeance has left any room for a future.

After being lost for fifteen years, the prime minister’s true daughter, Song Weilan, finally returns home and comes face-to-face with the false heiress who took her place. Beneath Song Jinyu’s tears and feigned innocence lies a vicious campaign to ruin Weilan, but this time Weilan refuses to remain a helpless victim. Armed with a sharp tongue, an unyielding will, and memories of suffering, Weilan fights for her family, exposes every scheme against her, and claims the freedom to live on her own terms.

One year into her marriage, Xie Wu refuses when her husband asks to take Lin Manrou as his concubine. The feud that follows costs Xie Wu her unborn child, her reputation, and thirty years of freedom—only for her to learn that both women were pawns in her husband’s plan to marry the cousin he truly loved. Reborn on the day he makes the same request, Xie Wu says yes. This time, she will play the dutiful wife, give every rival exactly what she wants, and quietly turn the Marquis of Annan’s household into a board on which only she knows the next move.

My father rebelled, and I became a noble legitimate princess.

Then, after taking the throne, he decided to make his old flame empress and force my mother to step aside.

Who could possibly tolerate that?

I command a hundred thousand soldiers and have won glory on every battlefield, yet he wants my mother reduced to a concubine—who does he think he is?

The emperor died too soon, and I became Empress Dowager at a young age.

To secure my son’s throne, I had no choice but to yield to the Prince Regent and become his illicit lover.

Later, when my son came of age, he finally reclaimed imperial power.

I sent the Prince Regent to the underworld with a cup of poisoned wine.

But I never imagined the Prince Regent had poisoned me as well.

As I coughed up blood in agony, he held me tightly in his arms and laughed madly in my ear: “If we die, we die together. Once we’re dead, we can be reborn together.”

Our blood mingled, and neither of us met a good end.

Before I died, through the haze, I thought: I had been such a pathetic Empress Dowager.

I had never lived a single good day.

If I truly could be reborn, I would stay far, far away from those two: the short-lived ghost and the madman.

But I did not get to be reborn into another life. Instead, I was reborn at the palace banquet where marriages were decreed.

The Crown Prince was about to hand the one and only Phoenix-patterned Jade Pendant to the woman he loved.

His gaze lingered on my face for an instant, as if he had made up his mind to give the pendant to me.

The next moment, I lowered my head and shifted slightly aside, letting him see Song Xiuying behind me clearly.

She was the one who had shared life and death with him in my previous life.